Welcome to the ISCB Community News Blog

This blog collects news, announcements or other information which could be of interest to our ISCB members. We are a group ISCB members who volunteer to populate this blog on a regular basis. In case you want to become an "ISCB-News Reporter" yourself, let us know: contact ISCBDon't repost copyrighted content! The guidelines are:- Include a link to the source page- Include a short summary about the article. You can quote up to ONE paragraph from the original story, but not more- Don't repost an entire articles originating from another source- Never post content without attribution — always include the sourceTo post a news, please use this form.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

In January, the SPC voted to establish a new ad hoc subcommittee that will focus on topics related to the evaluation of research and the research enterprise. The Research Enterprise Evaluation Subcommittee will incorporate some of the activities previously covered by the Peer Review Subcommittee, but will also explore topics related to measuring the outcomes from U.S. federal investment in biological and biomedical research and the emerging topic of reproducibility of research results. The subcommittee charge is attached to this email.

We are currently recruiting representatives to serve on this new subcommittee. If you are interested in serving or would like to nominate a colleague, please email me at yseger@faseb.org by April 15. Please do not hesitate to contact me should you have any questions.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Last week F1000Research (http://f1000research.com) published the BioJS collection (http://f1000research.com/article-collections/BioJS) which comprises of 12 open source biological visualisation components, one BioJS community article and an overarching editorial. The collection showcases JavaScript software components contributed by developers from all over the world and marks a significant step towards improving the way scientists can visualise biological data. The BioJS community, initiated at EMBL-EBI and coordinated by TGAC, has so far created 39 different software components in a very short time. Its new collection, like the community itself, provides a valuable resource for disseminating knowledge swiftly.

Manuel Corpas, Guest Editor of the F1000Research BioJS collection and Project Leader for Plant and Animal Genomes at TGAC, said: "There are many websites out there that try to give people new ways to visualise biological data that might originate with providers like EMBL-EBI or the NCBI. For users, for the scientists, it's important that the software behind those visualisations is held to an agreed standard. It ensures a level of quality, and more importantly, it makes it much, much easier to compare things and draw interesting parallels."

To find out more about the collection and the BioJS community then please read this interview with Manny: http://blog.f1000research.com/2014/02/18/biojs-visualising-biological-data-an-interview-with-manuel-corpas/.

There are many ways you can join this community: you could join the BioJS GitHub portal (https://github.com/biojs/biojs), follow the BioJS Twitter account @BiojsLibrary for updates on training events and also access the Google Group mail list of developers that it is open for anyone to join and/or read: biojs@googlegroups.com.

2014 National Medal of Science
~ The Nation's highest honor for American scientists and engineers ~
Call for Nominations (Deadline: April 1, 2014)

The National Medal of Science, established in 1959, is the Nation's highest honor for American scientists and engineers. The Medal is given to individuals deserving of special recognition by reason of their outstanding cumulative contributions to knowledge in the chemical, physical, biological, mathematical, engineering, or behavioral or social sciences, in combination with exemplary service to the Nation. It is administered by the National Science Foundation and, to date, has been awarded to over 450 individuals.

Nominations must be submitted by April 1, 2014. A complete submission consists of a nomination form and three letters of support. These items must be received via the National Science Foundation's FastLane system at https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/honawards. If you have any questions, please contact the program manager at nms@nsf.gov or 703-292-8040. For more information, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/od/nms/medal.jsp.
URL: http://www.nsf.gov/od/nms/nsf_2014nationalmedalofscience_callfornominations_140128.pdf

Monday, February 10, 2014

The Summer Science Program (SSP) is seeking innovative, college-level curricula to expand its successful residential program for highly motivated and gifted high school students. Authors of two selected curricula will each be awarded the $2,000 SSP Curriculum Prize and additional funding to test and launch their curricula. Funding is provided by a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

This competition is a unique opportunity for an educational innovator to build upon SSP\\\'s 55-year-long successful track record. \\\"We are open to ideas from anyone and any field of science,\\\" said Dr. Susan Jerian, an SSP alumna and current president. \\\"What matters is that these students get to do college-level, hands-on experimental science themselves. We are looking for projects that are much more challenging and exciting than the typical high school science lab. Our goal is for students to complete the SSP program with a visceral understanding of what being a scientist really feels like.\\\"

The prestigious Summer Science Program is a 39-day residential program that attracts hundreds of applicants from around the globe. Its mission is to provide highly motivated and academically gifted high school students (rising seniors) with an intensive immersion in interdisciplinary, collaborative research. The program accelerates participants\\\' intellectual and social development and raises their aspirations for college and career. Alumni go on to enroll at top universities with many becoming STEM leaders, teachers and innovators with significant impact on their chosen professions. A testimony to the program\\\'s effectiveness is the fact that it is managed and largely funded by its alumni. Few opportunities have been demonstrated to provide such a transformational experience for gifted students.

We invite you to contribute to one of the premier international and interdisciplinary events for presenting peer-reviewed scientific work in the field of Biological Data Visualization (BioVis 2014).
For the first time, this year the symposium will be held as a special interest group meeting at ISMB in Boston, MA, USA.

What are options to participate?
1) Papers:
submit high quality research; oral presentation at the symposium; all accepted manuscripts will be available through the IEEE Digital Library and will be considered for publication in BMC Bioinformatics

2) Posters:
work in progress and preliminary results; submissions consists of a 250 abstract and an image; previously published work from other venues; visualization challenges

3) Data Contest:
create a visualization (tool) that helps to identify and understand which rs-fMRI networks, from a large provided dataset, are replicates derived from the same individuals; submit a 2-page extended abstract

The rapidly expanding field of biology creates enormous challenges for computational visualization techniques for enabling researchers to gain insight from their large and highly complex data sets.

The Symposium on Biological Data Visualization (BioVis) is the premier international and interdisciplinary event for all aspects of visualization in biology. The symposium brings together researchers from the visualization, bioinformatics, and biology communities with the purpose of educating, inspiring, and engaging visualization researchers in problems in biological data visualization as well as bioinformatics and biology researchers in state-of-the-art visualization research.

We are looking for contributions on all aspects of visualization in biology, from molecular to cell, tissue, organism and population biology. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: